Chapter 1

Formation

“I want to go home.“ The lingering thoughts of a man left to lie, bleeding out on the cold, hard ground. As his blood seeped into the mud, he slowly lost feeling in each part of his body. The numbing spread from his neck and down to his legs. Awareness of the glittering night sky faded as the cold, numb feeling clawed upward. His sight went with it. The memories of a life of crime bled out too, fleeing from a dying mind like a scared child fleeing a predator. A final whoosh of the wind and the sound of leaves crunched beneath heavy footfalls were the last experiences of a dead man.

Darkness…

Cold…

Loneliness…

Nothingness…

An overly affectionate hug. That’s what death felt like. To someone with no name, it felt both too all-encompassing and freeing at the same time. Flashes of a past existence flittered past in the fleeting moments of a life being slowly and steadily forgotten. Blood, anguish, and pain were all they could recall from that last heartbeat.

Time and all those painful memories blended like a thick pool of blood drying in the mud. They wouldn’t remain that way, not if this thing could help it. It did the only thing it could and ran. Pressing through the nightmarish feeling, it chased the warmth of something else — more benevolent. The flittering images shifted from bloodshed and carnage to the peaceful and serene.

Flashes of healthy trees and peaceful animals wound past. Further and further awareness traveled, towards dead and dying trees—a decrepit swamp. Stones covered in moss and seeped in stagnant water. But it wasn't the environs on the surface this thing was rushing for. Instead, its attention jumped to the mouth of a small cave. Rushing down a rocky path like a fleeing animal, its senses took in very little among the dark cave walls as it descended deeper. In a final moment of panic-stricken stupidity, the soul stumbled towards the only light source it could see.

Blackness…

Gone were the flashes of pain and panic, replaced by a calm loneliness. But that wasn’t the only thing missing. Even the last glimpses of its body were gone. Or at least one familiar to its memories. Now, all it could feel was cold and hard edges against an equally hard surface. No longer confined to a human body, it was something smaller. The form dug into its fleeting memories, sight and other sensations teased, and bubbled to the surface.

Faint whispers floated past the edge of its awareness, tantalizingly drawing their attention like a hungry animal. Curiously, it chased its quarry. The chase had yielded another simple lifeform, and the seemingly foreign sensation gave it pause. But in its haste, had it made a mistake? Worry and panic set in again, replaced by confusion. Even without comfortable memories and experiences to draw upon, it could learn; it could take in the surroundings at its leisure, or so it seemed. And what else could be done?

The tranquil moment shattered as a new stimulus came crashing down. With the sensation of a chill crawling up a spine, something, or someone, wrapped its tendrils around the lingering mind. The shards of its lingering experiences and memories froze in the back of its awareness. In their place, a fresh voice came, cold and alien.

Did it even have a spine? Did that matter? Time was so strange in this form that it became hard to sort the present from memory. It had a name, a past, something worth hanging on to. Or at least that’s how this all felt. Flesh was out of the picture, as was any kind of familiar body.

The questions roiled to the surface in droves, pulling awareness in every proverbial direction. The torrent of uncertainty and fear was overpowered when a booming voice blasted apart the din of noise. A raspy howl that seemed like it could shake a mountain loose from the soil. As the voice spoke, it pushed any existential questions into the background.

“Consume,“ came a word crawling into its mind as sure as the wind blows. “Expand,“ came a second commanding utterance behind it. The commands came more like a howl on a moonlit night, threatening to attack like an unseen predator.

Emotions came flooding to the fore in that moment, fear thundering out ahead of the pack. The roar of these commands shook this new being to its very core, threatening to shatter its psyche like a dropped mirror.

Just as quickly as the commands came, they departed. And though fear of their influence remained rooted in the back of its mind, the being pressed on. It had to learn more about its situation. Even if just to free itself from whatever influence was pushing in on its thoughts.

Drawing upon its memories of sight, the thing attempted to form its consciousness into outward action, to see the world around it again.

Through the darkness, a shape formed, and with it came a glimpse of awareness, something beyond mere thought. The shape of the vessel this mind had become trapped in, a glittering and hard stone, with green edges around a dark red center. Its shape was jagged, not an ornately carved gem, more like a spire of rock—one that glowed with latent magic. More a tiny pebble emitting the smallest glint of light, like the tiniest shard of a broken mirror. Magic thrummed around this rocky form, spreading out in a deformed sphere. As the energy spread, so too did the awareness.

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This new form, whatever it was, sat isolated in a small cave. The cave lay at the end of a long passageway deep in the earth. The mix of soil and earth around the glinting pebble was replete with other things, too. Colors of all manner flooded, joining in with the mixture of sights and sounds that trickled in like a babbling brook. Within the sodden mud of the cave, the tiniest of lifeforms scuttled about. Tiny spiders, flies and worms flittered about hunting for sustenance.

As the core of magic tried to push its awareness deeper up the path, a new feeling crept in: exhaustion. Diving for the nearest source of energy it could find, the core sent its tendril of power out and across the floor of its cramped chamber. Reaching a sliver of green magical power out from the rock outcropping it rested on, a tiny finger touched the nearest worm. Like a child examining something unknown, the touch was tender and careful. In that instant, a particularly human realization slammed down onto the new consciousness.

Core…Core…

The world around the core was more than just stone and loose soil. Things both large and small lived within the earth, in a chaotic relationship of both peace and competition. And the core was about to feast.

A pang of hunger struck in that moment, something both old and new at the same time. Memories of meals enjoyed flashed in its mind from a previous life. But it felt strange, as if it was watching the memory through foggy glass. It would give anything to not feel this hunger, and so it did the only thing it could think to do: tried to use its magic to consume the lowly worm it was now connected to. If this magical spread was something akin to limbs, it was going to put it to use.

A tiny flitter of brown magic seeped from the worm, and the tendril of green, earthly magic seized upon it like a predator with a long-awaited prey. The tendril of life force from the worm is snapped up like a bit of wood caught in a tornado and spirited away to the surface of the tiny pebble in an instant.

Mana Obtained!

Level 0 Dungeon Established

Absorb more Mana to choose specialization

This was new but didn’t feel unwelcome. What does mana do? it’s got to do something, right? Well, time to experiment. Another green tendril reached out into the tiny chamber, searching for other things to interact with. Tracing its influence along the walls, more and more things came into ‘view‘. Aside from the likes of spiders and worms, the features of the walls and floor were a bit more lively than first considered.

Slivers of more mana fluttered throughout the surrounding stone, wafting to the core like a tantalizing meal. And, taking a cue from the new notification, the core chased after the wisps of energy. With a hungry wildfire burning within, tiny raindrops from feeding on worms would never be enough to quell it. At a careful pace, the core spreads its magic through the stone and dirt, looking for more magical food.

Delving deeper, whips of mana formed, drawing its attention. Tiny pockets of ore and gems not only added a bit of visual flair, but also held a variety of mana sources. Blue mana that’s refreshing, Brown mana that’s more sobering, like a weak medicine. Each sample of powerful energy brought a variety of flavors and emotions to the panic-stricken mind. And with the echoes of the haunting commands tearing at the edges of its sanity, it chased more and more of this feeling.

Slowly picking at the flows of energy coming in, the core found tiny bits of other mana interwoven within the flows. Within the blue tendrils being sucked into the misshapen marble-sized stone, there were the tiniest bits of golden thread. These delicious little morsels felt better than any meal the entity could recall. Emotion surged in their mind like a tidal wave when it gorged on the tiny flickers.

Distracted, the core didn’t notice when the surrounding life reacted to their ministrations. At first, the stirring of the insects and other life went ignored, until it encroached on the stone itself. It was almost as if the flow of mana was a siren’s call, drawing helpless victims in. Confused, the core tried to determine what the goal of advancing invertebrate animals. Maybe it was like a moth to a flame, or maybe their goals were more insidious.

The core responded in the only way it knew how — willing the flow of mana to lash out, thinking of the lance of energy like an attack on the forms rapidly closing in on it. Surprisingly, the lance had an impact, just not the expected one.

The jagged spear of green magic slammed into one of the nearby worms that lazily slithered toward its source. Constricting around the worm, the mana seeped into the creature, causing the animal to swell and extend. Tiny motes of light swirled around the animal, before zipping back into it. In the next instant, a flash of a notification came up again.

First Minion Claimed

Level 1 Dungeon Established

Level 0 Worm Transformed into Pitiful Worm

Well, that’s more than a little insulting. The core angrily tried to send more magic into the worm, determined to counter the perceived insult. Quickly, it ran out of steam. Not in the literal sense, but more so in the way that one does when they run out of breath and have to rest. That is a truly odd sensation with no head or lungs, but desperately, it pressed on.

The hunger from earlier came clawing back, pushing it to search for sustenance anew. Felling around, the core could only taste the tiniest wafting essences around the cave. There are other smaller pebbles of various kinds around the cave, both scattered on the floor and embedded within the walls. Sadly, none of them emits torrents of energy similar to the core’s own form. Instead, a lazy swirl of energy blends with the flows of background energy present all around.

There’s something that needs another meal: me. With renewed effervescence, the newly formed core had a mission: to harvest energy from the scattered sources around the cave and push it into the worm. Now, instead of feeling worn out, a renewed sense of purpose took over. However, it’s not the only feeling that came bubbling to the surface. In the absence of distractions, those darned questions returned.

“What the hell am I?”

“Where am I?”

“What am I doing?”

Existential questions get really weird when you don’t even have a brain. As if on cue, a flood of notifications answered the lingering questions, or some of them, at least.